Rowitz On Leadership

The events of September 11, 2001 changed the landscape of leadership development. We began to make a distinction between more traditional approaches to leadership development and the important area of development of leaders who need to function in crisis situations from natural disasters to domestic terrorism situations. During the first decade of this new century, we saw the development of special leadership development programs on crisis leadership. Ian Mitroff wrote several books during this first decade to demonstrate not only that crisis needs to be looked at in detail but there is a need to understand the leadership skills needed to function in all sorts of crisis including business downturns, reputational crises, legal crises generated by changes in the law, and so on. He has also strongly argued about the complexity issues inherent in crises. Vincent Covello gave many workshops on risk and crisis communications. I wrote a whole book on leadership and crisis and how leaders can make their public health organizations more prepared. In addition, I have written a book on traditional public health leadership.

I developed an exercise that I have used in numerous groups to distinguish between the skills of public health leaders as they work in organizations that are not in a crisis situation in contrast to leadership skills which are utilized to ameliorate the impact of a public health emergency. In my early experience with this exercise, groups appeared to make clear distinctions between the skills needed by leaders in traditional or normal situations in contrast to the skills needed to function in an emergency preparedness and response situation. It also became apparent during this period that there was confusion over what was management and what was leadership. Preparedness situations and the general perspectives tied to incident command seemed to reflect more of a command and control management and linear perspective rather than a systems-based leadership perspective. I have covered some of these issues in a number of my blog articles. One of the interesting results of this exercise was an increasing awareness that all leaders need to know how to function in an organization on a daily basis, but not all leaders seem able to function during a crisis. In other words, crisis leaders need to function in both traditional and crisis focused organizations, but some leaders seem to function well only in non-crisis situations. In his book MANAGING AT THE SPEED OF CHANGE, Daryl Conner has addressed some of these issues by concentrating on the importance of leaders  being resilient.

Leaders must be leaders regardless of the realities that they face each day. Leaders develop not only their personal leadership skills, they develop skill for their work on teams and other collaborative relationships, skills at the organizational level, skills at the community or systems level, and also skills involved in promoting knowledge and leadership at the professional level. Leaders need to learn when to manage and when to lead. They must work on trying to develop their personal as well as their organization’s resilience. They must learn that leadership is about normal times and not so normal times stimulated by a crisis. If resilience is low, an administrator needs to be able to draw on the skills of others who can lead in crisis. What this discussion means is that the parallel development of traditional and crisis leadership now needs to be merged. Leadership is about leadership under changing circumstances and contexts. It is time to view leadership as a lifelong learning process in which leaders explore and develop new skills and tools as they need them to address all these changing situations. I have used the concept of synergistic leadership in these postings to define leaders as individuals who draw from many sources and resources to address all possible situations. When the traditional leader cannot deal with crisis, they need to recruit others who can deal with these potential crises. However, traditional and crisis skills build upon each other to form a more comprehensive approach to leadership development. For me, this means that I have to combine my two leadership books into an integrated whole to reflect the complexities of leadership as well as the overall needs of effective leadership in a constantly changing social environment. As I pointed out in my last posting, we now need to consider the impact of health reform and an expanding definition of public health and how our leaders will be affected by these new changes.